The American Bankers Association joined a coalition of trade associations today in filing a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to interpret the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to ensure that customers can receive important communications from their banks and other companies with whom they do business.
In the case—Facebook v. Duguid—the court will review a lower court’s decision that expansively interpreted the types of dialing equipment that fall under the TCPA’s restrictions. The decision has made it much more difficult for banks to place automated calls to their customers.
“Customers expect, and even demand, routine communications like health care appointment reminders, delivery notifications, low-balance alerts, and fraud warnings,” the groups wrote. “In enacting the TCPA, Congress sought to preserve ‘normal, expected or desired communications between businesses and their customers’—not to prohibit targeted communications like the informational updates and alerts that businesses have long given to those customers.”
The brief cited ABA-provided data that banks are not able to place time-sensitive calls to millions of customers because of potential liability under the TCPA.
